Author: CCW

KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 11 March

Looking on the heart

Discipline actually means learning. In the Christian understanding, Lent is a season of spiritual discipline. It is not just about the lengthening of the days, but a time of discipline through “self-examination and repentance,” through “prayer, fasting, and self-denial,” and through “reading and meditation” upon the Word of God (BCP, p. 612). It has its counterparts in the other religions and philosophies of the world and at the heart of it are the important questions about self-understanding and self-awareness.

At the end of last week we embarked on the beginning of a brief consideration of the story of David, one of the great and compelling narratives in the Hebrew Scriptures found mostly in 1st and 2nd Samuel. David is a kind of ‘everyman’; that is to say, that his story reveals something to us about ourselves. In a way, the story of David is like a mirror held up to us so that we may see the truth about ourselves and as a window through which we may see something of the wonder of God, of one another, and of creation. A mirror and a window. The story of David begins with him being anointed as king. The context is a question about how Israel as a community is to be governed. Will it be by the prophets? Or by a king?

Samuel is the prophet sent by God to anoint as king one of the sons of Jesse, the Bethlehemite. Seven of the sons of Jesse are brought before Samuel but in each case none of them are chosen. “The Lord sees,” Samuel is told, “not as man sees; man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.” It is that sensibility that goes to the heart of the story of David and speaks most profoundly to our image obsessed world of selfies and instagram posts, twitter and facebook. You are more than your selfie, more than the image you present or as others imagine, more than the flickering shadows of your devices. David, the youngest son, is out tending sheep. He is sent for and, behold, the Lord says, “this is he.”

In many ways, it is a question about character but not on any strength of our own. This week in Chapel, we heard the story of David and Goliath and the story of the friendship between David and Jonathan. When we come back from the March break, we will continue with the story of David which entails the sin of David and his repentance. The ‘hero’ is not without his faults and failings. David shows us, as the preacher and poet John Donne notes, “the slippery ways into sin but also the penitential ways out of sin.” Pretty powerful stuff, the stuff of education.

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Prayers and liturgy

Gregory the Great, Doctor and Bishop

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Gregory the Great (540-604), Bishop of Rome, Doctor of the Church (source):

Saint Gregory, Holy Trinity, Sloane SquareO merciful Father,
who didst choose thy bishop Gregory
to be a servant of the servants of God:
grant that, like him, we may ever desire to serve thee
by proclaiming thy gospel to the nations,
and may ever rejoice to sing thy praises;
through Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord,
who liveth and reigneth with thee,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

The Lesson: 1 Chronicles 25: 1a, 6-8
The Gospel: St. Mark 10:42-45

Artwork: Saint Gregory, stained glass, Holy Trinity, Sloane Square, London. Photograph taken by admin, 20 October 2014.

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Uncategorized

Lent Prose 2020

Hear us, O Lord, have mercy upon us: for we have sinned against thee.

To thee, Redeemer, on thy throne of glory:
lift we our weeping eyes in holy pleadings:
listen, O Jesu, to our supplications.

Hear us, O Lord, have mercy upon us: for we have sinned against thee.

O thou chief cornerstone, right hand of the Father: way of salvation, gate of life celestial:
cleanse thou our sinful souls from all defilement.

Hear us, O Lord, have mercy upon us: for we have sinned against thee.

God, we implore thee, in thy glory seated:
bow down and hearken to thy weeping children: pity and pardon all our grievous trespasses.

Hear us, O Lord, have mercy upon us: for we have sinned against thee.

Sins oft committed, now we lay before thee:
with true contrition, now no more we veil them:
grant us, Redeemer, loving absolution.

Hear us, O Lord, have mercy upon us: for we have sinned against thee.

Innocent captive, taken unresisting:
falsely accused, and for us sinners sentenced,
save us, we pray thee, Jesu, our Redeemer.

Hear us, O Lord, have mercy upon us: for we have sinned against thee.

The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise. Psalm 51.17

Lord, for thy tender mercies’ sake, lay not our sins to our charge; But forgive that is past, and give us grace to amend our sinful lives; To decline from sin, and incline to virtue; That we may walk with a perfect heart before thee, now and evermore. (BCP, Penitential Service, p. 614)

Almighty and everlasting God, who hatest nothing that thou hast made, and dost forgive the sins of all them that are penitent: Create and make in us new and contrite hearts, that we worthily lamenting our sins and acknowledging our wretchedness, may obtain of thee, the God of all mercy, perfect remission and forgiveness; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. (BCP, p. 138)

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Sermons

Sermon for the Second Sunday in Lent

Have mercy on me, O Lord

Lent is one long  Kyrie eleison, we might say, one long “Lord, have mercy upon us”. It reminds us that seeking mercy is an essential aspect of prayer, an essential feature of the Christian faith itself, a confessional mode that belongs to something profoundly positive. Nowhere is that more powerfully seen than in this Gospel story about our need for mercy.

A woman from outside of Israel – Matthew says “a Canaanite woman,” Mark, “a Greek, Syro-Phoenician by birth,” in either case the point is clear, she is from outside of Israel – comes to Jesus seeking a healing mercy for her daughter, “grievously vexed with a devil,” disturbed in her mind in some sense, we would say. It is her quest for mercy that undergirds the whole scene, at once troubling and wonderful.

The point is very simple, yet I am quite aware of how disturbing this story is for people. What is all about? It is about an essential aspect of prayer, namely, the drawing out of us what in fact God seeks for us. There is no story more disturbing and yet more wonderful than this story. This woman from outside of Israel is put to the test about what it truly means to be an Israelite and she shows us exactly that.  Jacob striving or wrestling with God becomes Israel, one who strives with God. This Canaanite woman is the embodiment of what it means to strive with God.

She hangs in there in the face of silence, rebuke, and insult. Why? Because she has a hold of the very principle upon which the desire for mercy completely depends. She senses in Christ the only answer to her dilemma about her daughter. What she grasps intuitively, or better intellectually, is the wonder of the story because like the blind man on the roadside begging, she is insistent. She won’t let go of what she has a hold of.

This troubles us because we would like to domesticate divinity, making God subject to human goals and purposes. Just give us what we want, what we may even think we are owed, even entitled. As if God owes us. She comes to Jesus, to be sure, with a very specific request but her insight into the truth of God in Jesus is far greater. Because of her insight,  she holds on in the face of the torrent of testing.  “Truth Lord,” she says, finally and with great prophetic insight, “yet even the little dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ tables.”

Her opening plea for mercy and her closing statement are intimately connected. You can’t have one without the other. That she hangs in and perseveres and does so with directness and courage is the great wonder of the Gospel. It teaches us something about the nature of the Christian Faith. It is about our working with the grace of God. It is something active and alive. Christ is alive in her, we might say, strange as that may seem.

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Events, Month at a Glance

Week at a Glance, 9 – 15 March

Monday, March 9th
4:45-5:15pm Confirmation-Inquirers’ – KES

Tuesday, March 10th
6:00pm ‘Prayers & Praises’ – Haliburton Place
7:00pm Parish Council Meeting

Thursday, March 12th
3:30pm Service – Windsor Elms
7:00pm Holy Communion & Lenten Programme I on the Lord’s Prayer

Friday, March 13th
6:00-7:30pm Pathfinders/Rangers – Parish Hall

Sunday, March 15th, Third Sunday in Lent
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

“The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.”

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Prayers and liturgy

The Second Sunday in Lent

The collect for today, the Second Sunday in Lent, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

ALMIGHTY God, who seest that we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves: Keep us both outwardly in our bodies, and inwardly in our souls; that we may be defended from all adversities which may happen to the body, and from all evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 Thessalonians 4:1-8
The Gospel: St. Matthew 15:21-28

Michael Angelo Immenraet, Jesus and the Woman of CanaanArtwork: Michael Angelo Immenraet, Jesus and the Woman of Canaan, 1673-78. Oil on canvas, Unionskirche, Idstein, Germany.

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Prayers and liturgy

Thomas Aquinas, Doctor and Poet

The collect for today, the Feast of St. Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225-1274), Priest, Friar, Poet, Doctor of the Church (source):

Everlasting God,
who didst enrich thy Church with the learning and holiness
of thy servant Thomas Aquinas:
grant to all who seek thee
a humble mind and a pure heart
that they may know thy Son Jesus Christ
to be the way, the truth and the life;
who liveth and reigneth with thee,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
Amen.

The Lesson: Wisdom 7:7-14
The Gospel: St. Matthew 13:47-52

Frans Leuyx, Altarpiece, Chapel of St. Thomas AquinasBorn into a noble family near Aquino, between Rome and Naples, St. Thomas was educated at the Benedictine monastery at Monte Cassino until age thirteen, and then at the University of Naples. When he decided to join the Dominican Order, his family were dismayed because the Dominicans were mendicants and regarded as socially inferior to the Benedictines. Thomas’s brothers kidnapped and imprisoned him for a year in the family’s castle, but he finally escaped and became a Dominican friar in 1244.

The rest of Thomas’s life was spent studying, teaching, preaching, and writing. Initially, he studied philosophy and theology with Albert the Great at Paris and Cologne. Albert was said to prophesy that, although Thomas was called the dumb ox (probably referring to his physical size), “his lowing would soon be heard all over the world”.

His two greatest works are Summa Contra Gentiles, begun c. 1259 and completed in 1264, and Summa Theologica, begun c. 1266 but uncompleted at his death.

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Sermons

Lenten Programme on The Lord’s Prayer I

“Now as our Saviour Christ hath commanded and taught us,
we are bold to say, Our Father”

Even in a post-Christian age, the Lord’s Prayer continues to be used and remembered. It is probably the only prayer that many know off by heart. Yet we know it mostly, perhaps entirely, from its liturgical use. Somehow it is well-known and, remarkably, in its older English translation, the King’s James version. Somehow it is memorable.

We know it. We use it. But do we think much about it? Do we appreciate its radical meaning and its essential place in the life of prayer? Or do we simply rattle it off automatically and without much thought? Let’s be honest. And yet, there is something compelling about the Lord’s Prayer, as it has come to be called, that somehow stays with us and is part of us. It is the prayer which shapes all and every prayer in our liturgies and in praying. But what is prayer?

Prayer, Richard Hooker, famously tells, signals all the service we ever do unto God. Prayer is about our fundamental orientation to God and to our being with God. It is not just about seeking his will; it signals the profound idea of being with God in his will for us through prayer. “The whole of our life says Our Father,” the great 2nd/3rd century theologian Origen of Alexandria notes. All prayer, as Archbishop Rowan Williams suggests, is about “letting Jesus pray in us.” Prayer in other words belongs to our incorporation into the life of God in Christ.

It will be our Lenten task this year to explore, however briefly, the Lord’s Prayer to appreciate its teaching and meaning and to look at some of the ways in which its teaching has been considered by the ancient Fathers of the Patristic period, by certain medieval writers, as well as reformed and modern writers. The Lord’s Prayer is the living breath of the Church; the breath of the Holy Spirit in us through the words of the Son to the Father. And it is, as Origen so rightly notes, our whole life.

We call it the Lord’s Prayer. Why? And what does that mean? Simply that this is the prayer which Jesus has taught us. Jesus is Lord. “No  one can say that Jesus is the Lord, but by the Holy Ghost” (1 Cor. 12.3). We learn the Lord’s Prayer from Jesus himself as presented to us in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. “When you pray,” Jesus says in Matthew’s Gospel, “be not like the Hypocrites… Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask. Pray then like this: Our Father ….” (Matt. 6.5-13).

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Prayers and liturgy

Perpetua and her Companions, Martyrs

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Perpetua, Saint Felicitas, and their companions (d. 203), Martyrs at Carthage (source):

O holy God,
who gavest great courage to Perpetua,
Felicity and their companions:
grant that we may be worthy to climb the ladder of sacrifice
and be received into the garden of peace;
through Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord,
who liveth and reigneth with thee,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

The Epistle: Hebrews 10:32-39
The Gospel: St. Matthew 24:9-14

Perpetua, Felicitas, and five other catechumens were arrested in North Africa after emperor Septimus Severus forbade new conversions to Christianity. They were thrown to wild animals in the circus of Carthage.

The early church writer Tertullian records, in what appear to be Perpetua’s own words, a vision in which she saw a ladder to heaven and heard the voice of Jesus saying, “Perpetua, I am waiting for you”. She climbed the ladder and reached a large garden where sheep were grazing. From this, she understood that she and her companions would be martyred.

Tertullian’s The Passion of the Holy Martyrs Perpetua and Felicitas is posted here.

Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Christian Martyrs’ Last PrayerArtwork: Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Christian Martyrs’ Last Prayer, 1863-83. Oil on canvas, Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.

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KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 4 March

Truth, Lord, yet the little dogs eat of the crumbs
which fall from their masters’ table

For the most part, dogs get rather bad press in the Scriptures. Dogs returning to their vomit, dogs licking up the blood of Jezebel; these are hardly attractive images. To call someone a dog is an insult. On the other hand, in the Book of Tobit, for example, we have the lovely image of Tobias’ dog which captures something of the sense of the dog as man’s best friend and loyal companion, not unlike Odysseus’s dog, Argos, who sees his master in disguise after twenty years and doesn’t betray him but “passes into the darkness,” as Homer says, his destiny fulfilled. Elsewhere in the New Testament, there are the dogs that lick the sores of Lazarus lying at the gate of the rich man, destitute and in want, the dogs that show compassion and care in the face of our indifference and neglect of one another.

And then there is this story which opens us out to a whole other tradition and way of thinking about dogs in relation to our humanity. It is a powerful and, in a way, a disturbing story. A Canaanite woman comes to Jesus seeking the healing of her daughter, “grievously vexed with a devil,” disturbed in her mind, we might say. She is a non-Israelite. And yet she embodies most completely what it truly means to be an Israelite, namely, one who strives with God. Her exchange with Jesus is amazing for one simple reason. She, like the blind man by the wayside, won’t give up. She has a hold of something, an insight into the nature of God, of which she she won’t let go. She perseveres in the face of intimidating set-backs: silence, rebuke, and insult. Yet she, to put it bluntly, sticks with it.

To be an Israelite is to strive with God. Jacob becomes Israel precisely through that idea and experience. Here this Canaanite woman strives with God in Christ, seeing in him the healing power of God which alone can heal her daughter. We can say she is being put to the test and yet it is really the disciples whom Jesus is putting to the test. God cannot be simply the God of one group at the expense of others. At the same time Jesus draws out of the woman the deep truth and insight of her faith. The climax of the exchange is about little dogs. “It is not right to take the children’s bread and to cast it to dogs,” Jesus says, in what can only be received as a kind of insult. “Truth, Lord,” she replies, “yet even the little dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table.” Exquisite and profound. It captures her insight into the radical nature of Christ and what God wants from us, namely, our active engagement with his will and purpose for our humanity.

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